Zongkai Lin - Böcker

The design of complex artifacts and systems requires the cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams using multiple commercial and non-commercial engineering tools such as CAD tools, modeling, simulation and optimization software, engineering databases, and knowledge-based systems. Individuals or individual groups of multidisciplinary design teams usually work in parallel and separately with various engineering tools, which are located on different sites, often for quite a long time. At any moment, individual members may be working on different versions of a design or viewing the design from various perspectives, at different levels of detail. In order to meet these requirements, it is necessary to have effective and efficient collaborative design environments. These environments should not only automate individual tasks, in the manner of traditional computer-aided engineering tools, but also enable individual members to share information, collaborate and coordinate their activities within the context of a design project. CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) in design is concerned with the development of such environments.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2005, held in Coventry, UK, in May 2005.The 65 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions during at least two rounds of reviewing and improvement. They contain expanded versions of the papers presented at the conference and are organized in topical sections on CSCW techniques and methods, Grids and Web services, agents and multi-agent systems, ontology and knowledge management, collaborative design and manufacturing, enterprise collaboration, workflows, and other related approaches and applications.